Must lineages own land?

Abstract

In a recent study of peasant insurgency in nineteenth-century India, Ranajit Guha raises the question of “territoriality” in peasant consciousness, Peasants, he notes, and to some extent this applies to all rural people, defined their world in terms of territorial limits beyond which they had neither influence nor interests. This consciousness was rooted in their “sense of belonging to a common lineage as well as to a common habitat—an intersection of two primordial referents.” Common lineage and common habitat, or kinship and community, constitute the two essential allegiances of rural life. They may place limits on peasant mobilization, but as Guha argues, they also create whatever potentials there may be for struggle and change.